Telegram bot or mobile app: what your customers will use

Nothing to install

An app has to be installed, and then remembered. A Telegram bot needs neither. Your customers only need Telegram, and the bot opens there as one more chat.

In the lunch bot we built for a kitchen in Batumi, a client opens the chat and sees the week’s menu as one post, with a button for each day and one for the whole week. They pick a day, the number of sets, cutlery and an address, and the order reaches the kitchen already filled in.

Before the bot, orders came through chat and someone had to retype each one. The buttons took that job away.

Where your customers already talk

A bot can also write first, at the time you set. In the lunch bot, every day at 12:00 Batumi time the menu for the day after tomorrow goes to every client who had a delivered order in the last seven days. It lands in Telegram, next to their other chats, not in an app they would have to open.

The English school bot does the same with money. When a student runs out of lessons, four reminders arrive over the next three days. If the payment never comes, the bot frees the seat, takes the student out of the group chat and tells the waiting list for that level.

Nobody has to chase a payment by hand.

Payments and bookings in the chat

Money works in a chat too. The English school bot sells the seats in nine groups of up to four students. A student sees which groups still have room, and the seat they pick stays theirs for 15 minutes while they pay for one class or a package of four. Once the money is in, an invite to the group’s private chat arrives in the same conversation.

The bot also does the counting. After each class it takes one lesson from every paid seat and checks with the teacher that the class happened, and a student who missed it for a good reason keeps the lesson with a single tap.

The two bots do different jobs, but the same parts show up in both:

Your side: a panel in the bot or on the web

Someone also has to run the menu, the schedule and the orders, and that person doesn’t need an app either. The admin panel can live in the same chat or in a dashboard on your computer.

The English school runs everything from the bot. The kitchen uses a web dashboard with an order board and a monthly menu calendar.

Staff get a role of their own, so couriers, managers and teachers see only what they need. In the lunch bot that means today’s orders to pack and deliver, in the same bot the clients use. Nobody installs a courier app.

When a bot is the wrong answer

A bot lives in Telegram. If your customers don’t use Telegram, it won’t reach them, however well it is built. That is the first question, and you know the answer better than we do.

The second is whether the job fits in a chat. A lot does: CurtainBot, our own product, turns a room photo and a fabric swatch into a picture of the finished curtains. It is built for curtain shops and interior designers, and it works right in Telegram. What fits badly is work that has to go on without a connection, or that needs the phone’s hardware, such as Bluetooth devices.

If either answer is no, a bot is the wrong tool. For customers outside Telegram, a website may be the better place to start, and we build those too.

What a bot costs and how long it takes

A Telegram bot starts from $100 and takes from 3 days. The lunch bot went live on the first day of the project, and the English school bot five days after work began.

The price moves with the same five things as for any bot: scenarios, payments, where the admin panel lives, integrations and languages. Our article on what a Telegram bot costs goes through each one, and after a first call you get a written scope with a fixed price.

Questions

Alexander ZabrodinCEO · Founder

ZabSoft is a software company in Batumi. The person who scopes your project is the person who builds it.